Dio Horia Gallery is pleased to join NADA New York with a solo presentation by Cypriot artist Chris Akordalitis.
Akordalis' practice contemplates the inextricable interconnectedness between humans, animals, and the environment in search of a more grounded and spiritual interpretation of life. His work often proceeds by hybridizing the prevailing themes from the Middle Ages with those of Classical Mythology to locate and elaborate their lasting relevance to modern times.
For the booth, Akordalis envisions a dreamlike landscape where the boundaries between reality and imagination and between history and fable dissolve. In it, anthropomorphous, but certainly not human, beings appear to be in a constant state of relocation. Refugees of a mythical world, they are collecting stories and embarking on endless wanderings, imagining displacements in space-times that are indeterminate and diasporically fluid.
Akin to an ancient temple or a mythical cave, the booth centers around an imposing and attention-grabbing totemic figure of a mock-gargoyle. Historically used as a marginal grotesque architectural detail for redirecting rainwater away from the building’s masonry, the creature here takes center stage, rendered in seductively glossy gold-and-pink plexiglass. An allegory of the current geopolitical and economic climate, the work addresses the seductions of evil and the corruption of financial and physical global circulation.
The two adjoining walls of the booth appear as if abstracted chapters of a myth. On one, a hybrid creature (or are they several creatures locked in an embrace?)—part-Cerberus, part-Greek marble god come to life—appears, executed in Akordalis’ signature flattened neo-Surrealist-cum-neo-Pop style. Through this technique, the artist knowingly brings the timeless themes of his art into an inescapable dialogue with the present: Have we, he queries, flattened out and aestheticized the most elemental of our foundational fables?
The opposite wall is dramatically subsumed by an azure rainy sky that covers its entire surface. Atop it hangs a tondo of a creature not dissimilar to a gargoyle, here rendered chubby and pensive, less a monster than a cartoon character—much like some of today’s public figures appear to be. With this arrangement, the artist invites the audience to question with him: Have we entered a parallel world that we should not reach?
Over the past few years, Akordalis’ work has been developing as one overarching series of chapters that revolve around the symbolism of the day cycle and the persistence of historical memory. Having always stemmed from the current conditions and the zeitgeist contemporaneous to its creation, the artist’s latest series delves into the notion and the overwhelming feeling of darkness that have lately become inescapable: an environment of the New Dark Age. Hence his appeal to medieval symbology and Gothic figures, inserting them into his usual vocabulary rooted in traditional mythology, as well as his commitment to biological hybridity. The exhibition reappraises this idea of cultural contagion and virality, examining its social and gender context, its reappearance over the centuries, and its similarity to events that have occurred elsewhere.
